I Live By Technology, I Die By Technology

I am standing at the window, blogging, because by the window is the spare laptop, and the spare laptop is plugged into the extra speakers, and my coworker and I listen to Slacker.com all day from this laptop and these speakers. Right now, Regina Spector is singing It Breaks My Heart, and I agree.

I am using this computer because my computer, the perfectly decent computer that has been a trooper the past 18 months, since my boss ordered it for me, has suddenly started crashing. As I have advised many of my friends in the past, I am now running CHKDSK (which will finish, hopefully in a half hour so), then I may defragment, though I doubt that is the issue.

The issue, you see, is a specific program — Dreamweaver CS3 — and it is crashing when it tries to write to the “Clipboard” memory of the Windows operating system. I know this because I can reproduce the problem over and over again. I believe it is a specific file — but it may be more than one file.

Because I am not just blogging while I wait for CHKDSK to run, I did manage to find this fascinating blog entry to suggest that the problem may not be with any corruption in the file on my harddrive, but rather with some badly formed CF or HTML code that is making the whole program freak out.

The truth is, I believe there is a very strong likelihood that the code is bad — because I know it is. I am hacking on an incomplete web site that has been under development since 2004, that must go live in January of 2009, and which has been hacked on by at least three other developers before I got my grubby little hands on it.

In short, the damn thing is a mess.

But this is what I do. In fact, I have won huge props since I started this job by doing just this: duct-taping, hobbling together and occasionally completely rewriting complete web sites that have languished in development hell, as the developers in this office have cycled through the past few years.

The worst part of this particular nightmare has been the extent of the complexity of the site, the amount that has already been done (however badly), and the total lack of documentation from the client. Let’s name them by their acronym: DWR. The reason why there’s no documentation: they don’t have any of the rules written down. You’ve got to be kidding me, right? But it’s true. And like them, I’m not writing it down, either — just the occasional comment here and there. Mine and my colleagues’ comments in this code may be all that exists to define the business rules of this application. It boggles the mind.

But this is what I get for moving out of the hell of a publicly traded company (and the joys of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance) to the loosey-goosey world of working for the state. On the one hand, I have a lot more freedom. On the other, I am screwed by the freedom to be undisciplined.

And so it goes.

It must be time to break for lunch. I’m outa here.